Property rights adherents in Buncombe County do not want to take the new zoning ordinance sitting down. A streak of rugged individualism caused citizens in election years to display yard signs and bumper stickers saying, “You Zone, You Gone.†They put zoning to a referendum. It lost by a landslide. The commissioners decided to zone anyway.
The last ordinance was overthrown in court, not because it infringed unnecessarily on the ability of landowners to use their property, but because of technicalities. That is, after all, the way the legal system works these days. It would be politically incorrect to speak of moral rectitude, so angered parties hire lawyers to find more nitnoids than the other in the reams of contradiction that constitute the billowing body of law.
Now, $500,000 later, the commissioners have obeyed the letter of the law – not the law of property rights protection or representative government, but the law that dictates how government should announce its intentions for its subjects. Citizens are responding with a petition for the right to vote on whether or not they want to lose property rights. Yes, that is what I said. Collecting signatures will be an uphill climb both ways in the rural mountains of Buncombe County.
By the way, LUV stands for Let Us Vote.
